Musings of an Incorrigible Writer

10/24/2013

Realizing Life While We Live It...

"Do any human
beings ever realize life while they live it-- every, every minute?" (From Our Town by Thornton Wilder)

I turned 46 yesterday.

Where has all the time gone? Seems like yesterday I was graduating college (1990), getting married (1994), running around Philadelphia all night as part of an independent film shoot (1995), having babies (1996 & 1999), watching the Twin Towers fall (2001), adopting my dog (2001), moving into a new house (2005), burying my dog (2013), moving into another new house (2013)...and doing a heck of a lot of writing about the life I was leading in between it all.

Thank god for the writing (mostly blogging since 2003) because, to paraphrase Thornton Wilder, "writing helped me realize life while I was living it."

Like most people, I can easily recall the big moments in my life (I know exactly where I was when the Towers fell), but what about all the smaller moments that are here and gone before we even realize it? Why do most of us race through life, blind and unaware, allowing it all to pass us by?

For me, writing (including facebook and twitter) has kept me cognizant of my life as it was unfolding. It kept me present and conscious. I was often analyzing my thoughts and reactions almost in real time and trying to figure out what it all meant. At times, I was able to put pride (and shame aside) and find the humor even in the more demoralizing moments, by sharing them (my pain, humiliation, or anger) with a larger audience and finding the universal meaning or humanity in it all. Writing also allowed me to create a written record of my life events so that when I look back I can see who I was at any given moment in time, as well as see the person I've become.

I've done a lot, but still have a lot to do. I've made tons of mistakes and often repeated lessons (hard lessons) time and time again because I wasn't quite ready to get it right. It hasn't all been wine and roses. Life is hard at times, but also quite magnificent. But besides the glorious highs and the depressing lows, much of life is about the mundane or the minutes that pass us by. Writing about those elements has allowed me to see the majesty in the mundane and to appreciate every nuance of life that might have otherwise gone left unnoticed.

All things considered, turning 46 is just another birthday that often passes without much fanfare. It's not 13, or 21, or 40, or 75 or 100, or some other year our culture deems worthy of celebration. In fact, in past years (since I've turned 40), I would have looked in the mirror, thought about my aches and pains, or fixated on the increasing grey hairs and lines across my face, and wondered why time was so cruel.

Not this year. The difference is I'm different. Not on the outside, but inside. At 46 I've come to accept that this is my life and I love it all. I am exactly who I want to be at this moment and I am certain I am on track to becoming whomever I'm meant to become. Despite the mistakes or heartaches in the past, I wouldn't change a thing. I am who I am because of what I've been through. There were no accidents or wasted moments in my life. Every blessed or bloody minute has added up in hours, months, years and decades to this. FORTY-SIX. It's not the number that matters, but the minutes lived behind that number that counts.

I am not who I was at 23, or 35, or even 45. I am thankfully evolving, I
think, and that's the great part about aging. I don't see the wisdom in
wanting to stay young forever nor do I idealize the past. And if I ever do, all I have to do is scroll back to my blog (and beyond that my hand-written journals) to see the truth. Time is ticking away. Either we ignore that or we embrace it all.